Harvard Medical School | United States
Daniel Daneshvar, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, where he has dedicated his clinical, research, educational, and community outreach efforts to improving care for individuals following traumatic brain injury (TBI), with a special focus on repetitive TBI (rTBI). He serves as Chief of Brain Injury Rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation and co-Chair of Sports Concussion at Mass General Brigham, providing care for patients with acute and long-term sequelae of TBI while supervising medical students, residents, fellows, and research trainees. Dr. Daneshvar’s work has advanced clinical understanding and diagnostic approaches to TBI, including leading the identification of a novel concussion sign—the spontaneous headshake after a kinematic event (SHAAKE)—now implemented on the sidelines by professional sports organizations including the National Football League and the UK’s Professional Footballers’ Association. He has contributed to national policy and standards through consensus work with the NFL Chief Medical Officer and as a panelist for the Brain Trauma Foundation and Military Traumatic Brain Injury Initiative. To enhance clinical management of rTBI, he developed a retrospective clinical assessment tool for informants of brain donors, now used across multiple North American centers, and created the first positional exposure matrix (PEM) to quantify head impact exposure, which has shaped research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and inspired CTE prevention protocols. His scholarship, including lead or senior author publications in JAMA, Acta Neuropathologica, and Nature Communications, has clarified the clinical and neuropathologic features of CTE, contributed to diagnostic criteria, and influenced the NIH’s 2023 acknowledgment of a causal link between rTBI and CTE. Dr. Daneshvar directs a research portfolio exceeding $2.7 million funded by philanthropy, NINDS, and the NFL Players Association, and serves as Senior Editor for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Neurology. A committed educator, he received Spaulding’s Distinguished Research Mentor Award and Teacher of the Year Award, established a resident research track, and supported over 35 resident publications in the past year. Committed to public health, he founded Team Up Against Concussions and now directs concussion education initiatives at TeachAids, whose CrashCourse program has reached over 500,000 athletes. His outreach includes more than 200 media interviews to advance public understanding of TBI. Through these integrated efforts, Dr. Daneshvar aims to elevate standards of TBI care, prevention, education, and research.
Profile: Orcid
Featured Publications
Daneshvar, D. H., Mez, J., Alosco, M. L., Kiernan, P. T., Sullivan, K., et al. (2023). Association of cumulative head impact force with chronic traumatic encephalopathy neuropathology in American football players. JAMA, 329(12), 1024–1034.
Daneshvar, D. H., Nowinski, C. J., McKee, A. C., & Cantu, R. C. (2023). Repetitive head impacts and chronic traumatic encephalopathy: Applying the Bradford Hill criteria for causation. Acta Neuropathologica, 145(4), 411–432.
McKee, A. C., Cairns, N. J., Dickson, D. W., Folkerth, R. D., Keene, C. D., Daneshvar, D. H., et al. (2021). The revised neuropathologic criteria for the diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Nature Communications, 12, 2291.
Kiernan, P. T., Montenigro, P. H., Daneshvar, D. H., et al. (2022). Age of first exposure to repetitive head impacts and risk of neurobehavioral symptoms in former American football players. Neurology, 98(17), e1765–e1773.
Solomon, G. S., Daneshvar, D. H., et al. (2024). Consensus recommendations on concussion prevention and long-term health outcomes in elite sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 58(9), 521–530.
Montenigro, P. H., Baugh, C. M., Daneshvar, D. H., et al. (2017). Clinical subtypes of chronic traumatic encephalopathy: Literature review and proposed research diagnostic criteria. Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, 9(1), 56